Dear Sir/Madam, 1) In relation to the (i) 2018-19 and (ii) 2019-20 financial years please provide me with the total cost to your organisation of purchasing consultancy services. 2) In the 2019-20 financial year, what were the three most expensive daily rates that you paid to hire external consultants? 3) For each of these three please state: (i) the daily rate prior to the addition of VAT, (ii) the name of the company that was hired in and the advice/expertise sought, (iii) the number of days that you hired in this consultancy at that daily cost

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TfL Ref: FOI-1324-2021

Thank you for your request of 12^th October 2020 asking for information about the use of consultants.

Your request has been considered in accordance with the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act and our information access policy.

Specifically you asked:

“1) In relation to the (i) 2018-19 and (ii) 2019-20 financial years please provide me with the total cost to your organisation of purchasing consultancy services.

2) In the 2019-20 financial year, what were the three most expensive daily rates that you paid to hire external consultants?

3) For each of these three please state:

(i) the daily rate prior to the addition of VAT,

(ii) the name of the company that was hired in and the advice/expertise sought,

(iii) the number of days that you hired in this consultancy at that daily cost.”

While I can confirm that we hold the requested information, under section 12 of the FOI Act we are not obliged to comply with requests if we estimate that the cost of determining whether we hold the information - and then locating, retrieving or extracting it from other information - would exceed the costs limit of £450 (equivalent to 18 hours work). In this instance, we estimate that the time required to source the information to answer these questions would take up to a week, as it would require the manual check of a large number of records held across the organisation (particularly regarding questions 2 and 3). This is approximately twice the appropriate limit.

In order to bring your request within the costs limit you may wish to narrow its scope to focus on the information that is of most importance to you - for example, in respect of questions 2 and 3, by reference to a specific project or area rather than the entirety of TfL as a whole.

If you are considering submitting a further FOI request please think carefully about whether the request is essential at this current time, as answering FOI requests will require the use of limited resources and the attention of staff who could be supporting other essential activity. Where requests are made, please note that our response time may be impacted by the current situation.

Please see the attached information sheet for details of your right to appeal as well as information on copyright and what to do if you would like to re-use any of the information we have disclosed.

Yours sincerely,

David Wells

FOI Case Officer

FOI Case Management Team

General Counsel

Transport for London

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